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Review: TurboTax ItsDeductible and H&R Block DeductionPro

Consumer Reports News: February 15, 2010 07:08 AM

TurboTax ItsDeductible and H&R Block DeductionPro are two free online tools to help you value your charitable donations. While they're available year-round, they're particularly useful now. You can take advantage of them whether you use software to prepare the rest of your taxes or not. You'll only need to complete a short registration.

Both tools use data from independent sources to value donated goods, and let you tally contributions and charitable mileage.

In a recent test, we found DeductionPro more convenient. Unlike ItsDeductible, it allowed us to print out estimated values of deducted items. And in a random comparison of values for donated household goods, books and clothing, DeductionPro estimated higher values more often.

ItsDeductible's advantage is that it can help you value donated stock. But it won't let you print out the estimated value of donated items. We found a way around that, however: Highlight the pages with the estimates and use a "print screen" function on your computer to print the resulting image.

If you want, you can import your results into the online versions of TurboTax or H&R Block At Home (formerly TaxCut). Those tools are entirely free to try until you're ready to file.And if you use H&R Block At Home Free Edition or TurboTax Free Edition—both for more basic returns—you can prepare and file your federal tax return entirely free.—Tobie Stanger